Breaking the Silence: West African Authors and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

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Abstract

This thesis explores how Syl Cheney Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine
Dunbar (1990), Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1964), Ayi Kwei
Armah’s Fragments (1970), and Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl (1979) respond to
the need to revisit and re-think the history of transatlantic slavery. The texts of these
four contemporary West African authors provide symptomatic instantiations of the
problematic of writing silence, and narrating a history whose archives are impossible
to fully retrieve. By attending to the violence and silencing committed on the history
of slavery, as well as the difficulty of writing, and narrating, history from the
perspective of silence all the texts considered in this study perform acts of resistance
against the forgetting enacted in and among their communities, and the silencing of
colonial modernity, which has turned the history of transatlantic trade into a footnote.
Although, all four authors come from different historical specificities and
localities, and, thus, the ways they stage slavery in their narratives are informed by
the local/historical urgencies they encounter in each contemporary political context,
each, within their respective domain, provides powerful and influential examples of
undoing historical silences and absences, not by imposing voices or presences, but by
tracing the voids/gaps in the historical representation of slavery. The silent, but not
silenced stories of the slave trade that these authors narrate in their attempts to speak
to the history of slavery bring dis/order to the national and communal milieu, by
unsettling a number of myths such as this of ethnic purity (Coker); of ideal “homes”
for the diaspora (Aidoo); of national revolutions that putatively disrupt the colonial
past (Armah); and of communal/national discourses that include the gendered
racialised subaltern (Emecheta). These authors reveal the exclusionary practices of
these myths, bearing witness to the fact that they proliferate at the expense of what
they exclude. By bringing forth the excluded, the marginal, the “the othered” in place
of the dominant, the central and “the same” they raise the impossible, and yet
imperative, question of justice towards the “others”.
The study intends to introduce the work of these authors to the current resurgence
of interest on the literary trajectories of the Black Atlantic that tend to focus on the
narratives of diasporic writers dwarfing the voices that speak form within the African
continent. As I argue, close, symptomatic, readings of their texts through the lens of
slavery attest to the fact that its spectral presence is intertwined in the cultural and
communal fabric, and is used to comment and rethink issues such as questions of
belonging and ethnicity, the quandaries associated with the neo-colonial condition,
the role of the intellectual, violence and gender issues. Following the complexities
raised by each text, my chapters explore a number of concepts such as “diaspora”,
“ethnicity”, “trauma”, “memory”, “violence”, “the city”, “subaltern agency” and “the
body” that invite cross-disciplinary links between post-colonial studies and a number
of fields such as history, geography, feminism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and
political theory. One of the ambitions of this study is that these initial forays into a
largely unexplored field will lead to further research in African representations of the
history of slavery; at the same time, its larger goal is to provide the stepping stone for
trans-Atlantic dialogues between African and diasporic writers, who will re-think the
history of the Atlantic from the perspective of its spectres, from the perspective of
the footnoted.